Data centres operating in Germany currently consume around 3 % of the total electricity produced and are responsible for CO₂ emissions of just over 8 million tonnes per year. As a result, even small energy savings ultimately lead to significant reductions in the total energy consumption of data centres and thus to relevant savings in CO₂. The aim of the funding track "GreenHPC" by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is to improve the energy efficiency of high-performance computing, both of high-performance computing centres at universities and research institutions and of commercial computing centres.

The STXDemo project will provide a proof of concept for future energy-efficient high-performance comput­ing. It will develop a hardware prototype made of a motherboard with multiple STX processors, which are processing units optimized to solve stencil algorithms. STXDemo will build on the work done in the EU European Processor Initiative (EPI) project and aims to improve energy efficiency by at least a factor of two compared to competing platforms based on GPUs or x86 processors. The benchmark for the success of the project is the improvement of the energy efficiency of selected computationally intensive simulation applica­tions. FZJ will contribute a co-design application from the field of lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) and will host one hardware prototype at JSC. Further project partners are the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (coordinator), TU Kaiserslautern, and Zollner Elektro­nik AG.